What Is
Heat Soaking？
Heat soaking is a testing process carried out in the manufacturing stage of glass, used to reduce the risk of spontaneous breakage in architectural glazing.
What Is
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Heat Soaking principle
As we know a nickel sulphide inclusion is a naturally occurring phenomenon within toughened glass in which small particles of nickel sulphide may be present in glass after the manufacturing and toughening process. Although the inclusions are not visible, these particles can cause spontaneous glass breakages if the glass is aggravated by sudden or extreme temperature changes.
The heat soak test involves placing the tempered glass inside a chamber and raising the temperature to approximately 290ºC for two hours, the high temperature helps to identify any weak spots or defects that could lead to spontaneous breakage and accelerate nickel sulfide NiS expansion. This causes glass containing nickel sulfide inclusions to break in the heat soak chamber in advance, thus reducing the risk of potential field breakage.
Where to use?
Heat Soaked Glass can be specified for any installation of architectural glazing. However, it has more value in glass installations that be specified on high level, inaccessible or difficult to fit installations due to these installations of architectural glazing being harder to access and replace if required in the future. Minimising the risk of having to replace glass in the future reduces future cost and disruption to a client or building.
In architectural applications, heat-treated glass significantly reduces the breakage potential due to thermal stress and stress from uniform loads such as wind and snow loads. In most cases, heat strengthened glass of the appropriate thickness and quality eliminates opportunities for breakage due to thermal stress and wind load. In cases where safety glazing is required by code or responsible design, then fully tempered or laminated heat-strengthened glass should be specified.
- Large glass installations above the ground floor level
- Where a crane is required for the glass installation
- Complicated or intricate glass designs
- For glass units glass that are supporting other elements
- Glass installations using oversized or very specialised glass units
Heat soaked glass VS heat strengthened glass, what is the difference?
Generally speaking, both heat soaked glass and heat strengthened glass is considered to decrease or avoid the glass spontaneous breakage.
However, due to its completely different processing, heat soaked glass is about 5 times stronger than normal annealed glass. Whereas heat strengthened glass is only about 2 times higher strength than normal annealed glass. Heat soaked glass is adopted where requires higher strength & less breakage danger and heat strengthened glass is used where less strength or higher glass surface flatness required. Usually heat strengthened is used as laminated glass to enhance its safety.
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